In Which We Talk Games

playing them, making them, drooling on them.

I mentioned in passing, just before the Big Social Media Break of 2004™, that I’d (re)discovered solo roleplaying games.

That was kind of an understatement. It was closer to OMG I FOUND OUT ABOUT SOLO RPGS AND THERE ARE INDIES MAKING THEM AND THERE ARE A THOUSAND KINDS OF STORIES AND WAYS TO PLAY AND OMG OMG OMG (…devolves into actual puddles of drool here.)

If you’ve been with me for a while on this little journey we call life, you’ll know a thing about me: I don’t do things half way. Things may not always pan out how I think they will, but if there’s something I’m interested in, I will dive into that thing with all of my feet.¹

Indie games had all of my feet in February.

It started because of MUSE, a game for getting artists unstuck, that I dreamed up late last year.

I thought I was inventing something that’d never been done before. The whole concept is that if you’re stuck, you can run through MUSE and come out with some creative restraints², and punch that artblock straight in its kisser.³ I’d planned to do this with some dice rolls and a fun set of modifiers, including at least one badger.

I like badgers. I almost called the game “Game of Badgers”, but thought that HBO and G. R. R. Martin would probably come for me, and ain’t nobody got time for that.

So MUSE, it became. I drew pictures. I wrote out rules for playing by yourself and playing with your art-friends. I did bonus challenge modes and bought dice and hand-printed little bags for them. I bought boxes big enough to mail them, and priced out printing in full color to make it fun.

And just on a whim one day, I thought I’d look up other life games, played solo.

Y’all. There were like a million of them. I squealed out loud.

As far as I’ve seen, there’s nothing specifically exactly like Game of Badgers MUSE. But there are so many other ones. Games where you tell a story. Games where you write imaginary letters or fictional diaries. Games where you make maps, or use those origami fortune-tellers we all made in third grade to tell us how many kids we were going to have.⁴. Games set in dungeons, or quaint villages, or diners in weird small towns, or in your own life.

I mean, I always knew gamerfolx (especially tabletop gamerfolx) were a creative lot. I just didn’t realize, I guess, just how prolific they are, too. I started collecting on itch.io after finding their physical games download section, and now I could do nothing but play solo games for roughly, y’know…ever. It did not help that I found this during an annual event month on Kickstarter/other crowdfunding platforms called “Zine Month”, where people were releasing crowdfunded games en masse on that platform. I may have backed a thousand of them few of them.⁵

I’ve got a journal and a weird silicone pen and a few decks of cards and some dice and four million purchased and/or downloaded solo journaling RPGs now. See evidence:

Honestly, if I’m not doing other things (which I’ll get to later, another day), I’ve got my nose in a booklet, rolling dice and writing about what I’m doing as a dog. Because dogs.

AND, because of that no-half-measures thing…

I’m also writing stuff for games of my own. There are some projects I’ve had backburnered for ages that I couldn’t quite get ahold of, and I’ve realized that they weren’t working as fiction or classes because they’re games. And they’re fun. And now they’re off the backburner.

I’m taking a couple classes on RPG design, because I feel like there’s a language and a format that I don’t have or understand completely yet⁶. And I’m doing a deep-dive on classic games, from board games on up, since game mechanics (the part of a game that’s procedural — you roll this many dice and do this when that happens, etc.) aren’t my strong suit. They⁷ say that modifying existing mechanics make it easier for players to understand, et. al., so I’m trying to see what already exists that I may or may not know about.

For example: my current reading stack.

All of this is to say that I’m down this particular rabbit hole pretty far, and I’ll probably babble about it for the next couple days and probably sporadically thereafter.

Because, y’know, all of my feet and such. I’ll try to keep it interesting.

So, next time: I’m going to tell you about interactive fiction and transmedia storytelling and how that’s pretty much everything I’ve ever wanted to do, minus the part where I very much want to just live on a dog sanctuary and spend my days in a pile of puppies.

Question: do you like games? Have I just been living in a tunnel this whole time and didn’t notice the amazingness of all this game stuff, lagging behind you and the rest of the civilized creative world? What do you play? Have you tried this solo RPG thing before? Got any recommendations?

Fill the comments up with your game-enlightened wisdom, y’all.

Also, do you want some specific game links to things I’ve found that are freaking amazing? Without the dreaded algorithm, I can link you up a bunch without being deprioritized to the depths of news feed hades if you’re interested. :)

1. Generally speaking, there are only two of them. Feet, I mean. But metaphorically, I have all the feet and I will dive in with every one of them. It’s both my superpower and my curse.

2. “Restraints” sounds negative, but as science has confirmed, having a smaller set of choices actually frees up creativity and can boost creative action-taking. It’s the deciding on those restraints that sometimes has people all bound up in knots.

3. Can I just interject that, again, I’m freaking thrilled to have the ability to express wanting to punch something imaginary in the face and not have a bunch of auto-modbots come and take away my birthday? SUCK IT, ZUCKERBERG.

4. I grew up before smartphones. Let an old lady be nostalgic, here.

5. I regret nothing.

6. The Storyteller’s Collective classes on Adventure Design and Choice Design in Game Books, for the also-interested.

7. In the Ubiquitous They sense, that is.